The L.A. Times music blog

Coachella 2010: Major Lazer scales a major ladder

April 18, 2010 | 7:58
am

One of the few rules of DJing is this -- don't climb on the booth. For your own safety, the safety of your gear and the safety of others, just don't do it.

Unless you're in Major Lazer. In which case, feel free to use a giant ladder to scale to the top of the rafters before leaping over a couple of Chinese lion parade floats to dance with lasciviousness atop your very willing partner.

Major Lazer is a reggae-inclined electro duo made up of white-hot producers Diplo and Switch, each of whom can claim a bevy of M.I.A. hits and other hugely successful club fodder on their CVs. However, both are probably best known for eliciting the dance moves of others, not their own. So for live incarnations, they recruit a couple of the most enthusiastic hype men and women a band could fathom.

A woman in a skimpy wedding dress and a guy whose vocabulary contained primarily the words "Major" and "Lazer," they ground, flailed, shrieked and performed anatomically impossible feats of flexibility onstage. The woman capped her night by vaulting herself into a headstand on the mixing console and performing an inverted freak dance to the delight of all below.

The climax came when the band brought out a massive ladder that clearly could only yield some unparalleled tawdry delight. First our good man climbed it, leaped off and asserted his joy at the occasion to his waiting lady below. Then they flipped the equation, and she climbed to the ladder and flung herself off to absolute rapture from the crowd.

There were lasers, yes, but the dancing was truly, unprecedentedly major.